All they want for Christmas is … Web 3.0?

Just when you were getting used to the idea of Web 2.0, along comes Web 3.0, which, according to a recent Booz & Co. report, “will offer an entirely new level of connectivity, communications, and information on customers.”

Search engines will be smarter, recommendation engines will know more about users’ habits and preferences, social media will continue to flower, and new kinds of services will make it all easy to manage. Booz calls this “the Transcendent Web” and notes it has four key elements:

The social web — chiefly the enhancement and personalization of search, location, recommendations, and other services, thanks to the collection and leveraging of immense amounts of user data

The Internet of things — the Internet-enabling of the stuff around us, such as our houses, cars, appliances, and, notes the report, “even clothing,” so they’ll be easier to maintain and fix, and easer to track (GPS, RFID) and gather info from.

Artificial intelligence — the technologies that will convert inputs from browsers, user-specified preferences, your house and car and clothing, etc., into exploitable information.

These elements, says the report “are not fully in place.” But Santa’s been warned.